Fears over Pet Anesthesia

by Dr. Chris

March 1, 2010: The thought of anesthetizing your pet for a surgical procedure or a dental cleaning is worrisome for many pet owners. In the past much of this fear was well-founded because of lack of advanced anesthesia and monitoring techniques in veterinary medicine. However these days, human grade anesthetics are being used in veterinary medicine and much more advanced monitoring equipment is being used. So, having your pet anesthetized has never been safer.

Risks of Anesthesia

Whenever a pet, or any human, goes under anesthesia there is always a risk. While doctors and veterinarians do their best to minimize that risk that there is never a 100% guarantee that an anesthetic episode will be uneventful. Anyone who guarantees no anesthetic risks to your pet is lying to you.

5 Ways to Minimize Risk

There are many ways to minimize any perceived anesthetic risks that your pet might encounter.

1. Pre-exam: Before your pet is taken for any anesthetic procedure your veterinarian should do a full physical exam on your pet, specifically examining the heart and lung function.

2. Blood testing: A simple blood panel to examine how well the kidney and liver is functioning can prevent many problems from happening.

3. Monitoring equipment: Monitoring equipment can often tell us if there is a problem happening before we can actually perceive it with our human senses.

4. Multi-modal Anesthesia: The types of anesthesia use and how they are delivered to the pet can make a great deal of difference in how safe the anesthetic episode is.

5. Staff skill: The skill of the veterinarian and the seminary technician is the biggest factor in how safe your pet is during anesthesia.

Questions to Ask

If you’re feeling uncomfortable with your pet undergoing anesthesia here are some questions you should ask and get answered before signing your pet over for the procedure

1. Who will be monitoring the pet while it’s anesthetized?

2. What type of monitoring equipment will they use?

3. Will an endotracheal to be used? (it should be)

4. Will an IV catheter be placed? (one should always be placed)

Multimodal Veterinary Anesthesia

Currently the best practice for inducing anesthesia in veterinary medicine is to sedate the pet with injectable anesthetics and then switch them over to gas aesthetics until they reach a surgical plane of anesthesia.

Just using one type of drug through the whole anesthetic procedure is not the safest way, and can be much more dangerous.

Pet X-rays & Dental Cleanings

Another common concern that pet owners have is why their pets need to be sedated for cat dental care, dog dental care, and x-rays. This is because unlike humans, pet often do not willing lay still for minutes at a time. So having them sedated for a pet dental is safer for them and safer for the staff. Because of this, pets are sedated much more often than humans are.

If you’re concerned about having your pet anesthetized for a procedure you need to ask your veterinarian specifically what is going to happen, who is going to do it, and what it is going to be use to make it happen safely.

It is the job of the veterinary staff to properly educate you. If your clinic does not do a good job of educating you about the procedure your pets are going to go through, then maybe you should find a different veterinary clinic.

National Pet Dental Month

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